jotter: pen and paper

Inspiration

paper is still the best notes app. it just can't find anything, set a reminder, or sync. so we kept the paper and quietly added the software underneath.

What it does

a notebook for your iphone that writes in your own chosen handwriting. you flip pages sideways and tap a box to tick it, and a pencil line crosses the words out. type "dentist friday 10am" and it offers to remind you. it syncs through icloud, searches every page, and shares a page as a torn-out sheet lying on linen. no ai, no account, no folders.

How we built it

swiftui and textkit, with fourteen handwriting fonts and a real pencil sound. sync runs on cksyncengine and merges changes line by line. nsdatadetector reads the dates, so there's no ai involved. there are widgets, siri, spotlight and a control center button. revenuecat handles pro, and we leaned hard on claude code.

Challenges we ran into

• making typed text feel handwritten without losing what makes it text: search, select, copy
• two phones editing the same page at once without either one losing words
• making sure a sync can never wipe out a notebook
• hindi, thai and japanese still had to look hand-drawn
• sizing a shared page so the handwriting is as big as possible and never breaks a line in a new place

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• it feels like paper until you need it not to
• you can just start writing: no titles, no setup
• there's no blank-page clutter, since a page only exists once it has a word on it
• the paywall never shows up uninvited
• shared pages actually look good

What we learned

restraint is a feature. every button we didn't add made it feel more like paper. also, sync is 10% code and 90% thinking about how things can go wrong.

What's next for jotter: pen and paper

• apple pencil, so you can write on the page for real
• ipad, two pages open like a real notebook
• more papers and more hands
• stickers? maybe. we're still arguing about it

Built With

• metal
• swift
• swiftui